When university student Jen* faced a seven-hour shift at work after a night of socialising, she turned away from coffee to help her stay awake and picked up a little white pill.
The Charles Sturt University student took a Ritalin pill just before midnight and when she got home, she was able to study, tidy her room and watch a movie before starting work at 5am.
"I hate caffeine, so it was an alternative for me when I needed to feel awake for work," she said, although she had never been prescribed the drug commonly used to treat behavioural disorders like attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD).
Jen said more people were turning to prescription medications as stimulants to balance study, work and social commitments.
She estimates about 40 per cent of the people who live on campus have experimented with drugs like Ritalin or Adderall to concentrate on completing assignments and studying for exams.
The drug habits of Australian students will be the focus of new research to determine whether prescription medications are being misused in a bid to enhance academic performance.
A survey, commissioned by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, will seek information from students across four Australian universities.
The findings, due to be released in 2016, will build on the first big study of prescription stimulant misuse at Australian universities, published last year, which found 8 per cent of undergraduate participants had used the drugs in a manner not specified in the approved packaging label.
This research, led by University of NSW performance psychologist Jason Mazanov, polled more than 1700 students at four large south-eastern universities about their use of cognitive enhancers, illicit drugs, caffeine and natural diet supplements.
Of the 164 students that reported using prescription amphetamines, about two-thirds said they took them to improve their concentration and ability to focus. One-third said that they took them to "get high" or "enjoy the feeling".
The report also noted users of illicit substances were more likely to have tried the drugs, suggesting that for some students they represented a cheaper, more readily available substitute for cocaine.
Women studying law and medicine were particularly likely to have taken prescription stimulants.
Researchers concluded that while the sample was biased towards students who engaged in such behaviour, enough Australian university students used substances to enhance academic performance to warrant further investigation.
Dr Mazanov said the results suggested students were "self-medicating" the massively competing demands they had on their time.
"The ones that most concern me in relation to stimulant use are also full-time parents and full-time workers," he said.
Professor Wayne Hall, director of the Centre for Youth Substance Abuse Research at The University of Queensland, is leading the research team conducting the latest round of research.
But early indications suggested students were not using drugs to boost academic performance on the same scale that had been seen in the United States, he said.
* Not her real name.
